The Dovahkiin Always Rings Twice
by Metrophor
Summary: *SPOILERS FOR THE THIEVES' GUILD QUESTLINE*   When the Dragonborn goes to investigate Riftweald, Mercer isn't long gone: He's waiting for her. Originally written for the Skyrim Kink Meme.


**Title**: _The Dovahkiin Always Rings Twice_  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: F!Dragonborn (Dunmer)/Mercer Frey  
><strong>Spoilers<strong>: For the Thieves' Guild questline, particularly '_Speaking With Silence_' and beyond.  
><strong>Trigger Warnings:<strong> This fic is rated M for violence and some rather... explicit... content, including bloodplay, knifeplay, and dubcon. Read at your own discretion.

**A/N**: So here it is- the fic that started it all; 'it' being my unholy obsession with the Thieves Guild in general, and Mercer Frey in particular. It's a bit more polished than the version found on the Skyrim Kink Meme, and I've added some callbacks to subsequent fics in the series, but overall I'm fairly happy with how it turned out.

Also, according to the Creation Kit, Mercer's eyes are actually green, not grey (as I've depicted them in this story). Ah well.

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><p><strong>The Dovahkiin Always Rings Twice<strong>

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><p>Nalvyna Sondryn was not having a good day.<p>

In retrospect, she supposed, Riftweald ought to have struck her as suspicious right from the beginning.

Mercer Frey -master thief, former guild leader, and traitorous backbiting git- had been working his way around difficult home security for more than twenty-five years; by all rights, his domicile should have been locked up tighter than Jarl Elisif's chastity belt. And yet, with the help of nightfall and a few well-placed bribes, infiltrating the place had been almost tragically simple.

The newest addition to Riften's criminal underbelly shifted her weight, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as she surveyed the final array of traps standing in the way of her destination. Her boots protested with a creak of leather-on-leather, and the Dunmer instinctively froze (though she was fairly certain the guards patrolling the upper levels of Riftweald couldn't hear a footstep over the whistle and slice of trap mechanisms, it never hurt to be cautious).

_Sharpened pendulums, Mercer? **Really?**_ Her lips curved into a wry, almost pitying, smile at the thought. Either he was arrogant enough to believe that no one would dare break into his house, much less get as far as she had, or he'd been in even more of a hurry to escape than Brynjolf had thought. He hadn't even bothered to alternate the timing between swings.

She couldn't believe she'd actually _admired_ him. Hell, as soon as Brynjolf had cracked open the Guild safe and found it barren, the first words out of her mouth had been a blurted cry of: "That's _incredible_!" (Karliah had looked as though she wanted to strangle her fellow Dunmer for that, while Delvin had sighed and thumped her smartly on the back of the head.)

They were right, of course. Mercer had broken every one of the unspoken rules of the larcenists' cabal, destroyed her trust, and tried to murder her. It was stupid -_obscene_, in fact- that a dark, treacherous part of herself was almost proud of him.

_One one-thousand..._ Nal planted her hands on the ground, thigh muscles tensing as she rested her weight on her fingertips. _Two one-thousand..._ The dark elf sprang into a roll, tucking chin to chest and arms to sternum as she exhaled in an attempt to make herself a smaller target. The thief's momentum brought her easily past the range of the blades, but the window of opportunity was too brief to allow herself a pat on the back. Spring, tuck, roll-

A line of white-hot pain lashed across her shoulders, and the Dragonborn stumbled as she came out of her roll, training temporarily replaced by shock. One dark-skinned hand reached back instinctively, feeling for the source of the sudden discomfort, and came away from her bicep red-stained and sticky. The cut wasn't deep -it had, in fact, barely even penetrated her armor- but it throbbed and burned beneath her hand, an obnoxious reminder of her mistake, and she knew that it would itch abominably before long.

She sincerely hoped Mercer hadn't the foresight to poison the blades. A certain drunken rampage across the breadth of Skyrim (courtesy of a certain Daedric Prince of Debauchery) was bad enough; if, after the myriad trials and tribulations leading up to this point in her life, the Dragonborn should happen to die in a basement because of a stupid _scratch_, she'd be the laughingstock of whichever afterlife happened to be waiting for her.

Ahead of her yawned a wide archway, and beyond, a brief stretch of mold-slick steps. She descended them two at a time, holding the wall for support and praying to Nocturnal that there wouldn't be any more unpleasant surprises waiting up ahead. Judging by the increased amount of candlelight down the hallway, she was surely nearing the end of the gauntlet.

Apparently, even Daedric lords had a limit to the amount of schadenfreude they could take in at one time, because the Dunmer's prayers were answered: no traps, no pitfalls, no painfully oblivious bandits. Blinking against the light, one grey-skinned arm raised to shield her watering eyes, Nal found herself in what she could only assume was the ex-Guildmaster's safe room.

She was, frankly, surprised at how spare the place was. A desk, a single chair, and a handful of book-lined shelves... for a man as obsessed with accumulating wealth as Frey apparently was, his refuge showed a remarkable degree of restraint. That probably meant that he'd hidden most of his pilfered treasure elsewhere; she hoped they'd have a chance to interrogate the prick before it was all over.

The room wasn't completely free of temptation: A blue glint drew her attention to the right corner of the desk, and Nalvyna felt her breath catch in her throat as she spotted the display case beside the desk. A sword of exquisite craftsmanship sat nestled on a bed of crimson felt. If she didn't know any better, she would have said the blade was shaped from refined malachite... except that the candlelight sparked an unmistakable icy blue along its edge. It was beautiful, and she could feel her fingertips start to itch as she cast a glance at the lock.

_Focus_.

Nal was here for a reason- Brynjolf would skin her alive if she let Frey escape in favor of looting his house. If, of course, Karliah didn't beat him to it. Unfortunately, what Mercer lacked in honor, foresight or taste, he made up for in misdirection, and the young thief rifled through his desk drawers with a growing sense of dismay. Ciphers, notes, reams of paper covered with encoded messages... at this rate she was going to run out of space to put them, and she sure as hell didn't have the time to pore over them all in search of clues.

Nal's jaw tightened, and she glared at the ever-increasing pile as if she'd discovered it eating a kitten. He was doing this to her on _purpose_, damn him. Somewhere, probably halfway across Skyrim by now, Mercer Frey was sitting in a tavern and-

The candle beside her right elbow abruptly flickered, an errant breeze lifting the corners of the paper beneath her hand and causing the the flame to dance merrily from side to side.

Nalvyna prided herself on her steady nerves. She was, after all, Dovahkiin- Thane of Riften, hero of legend**, and cheerful liberator of other people's belongings. She had a _reputation_ to maintain. That reputation, however, didn't prevent her heart from dropping to the pit of her stomach at the sight. The air in the room was as still as that of a wine cellar, humid and thick with the licorice tang of mildew. There shouldn't have been any sort of breeze at all.

"You know," a low voice growled, from a point just behind her left ear, "you really should pay more attention to your surroundings."

She had just long enough to wonder if Mercer had been standing behind her the entire time, before something collided solidly with the back of her head.

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><p>Pain exploded like a fireball behind her eyes, vision shattering into an array of black-and-white dots as she toppled bonelessly out of the chair. Half-standing as she had been, her passage nearly overturned the desk, scattering candle and papers as she grabbed for a surface to hold onto. Before she could collapse entirely, whether to the ground, unconsciousness or both ('both' was looking pretty attractive at that point), calloused fingers wound through her hair in a cruel, tight-fisted grip.<p>

She screamed in pain as the hand hauled her upward, clawing at his wrist in a desperate attempt to relieve the pressure against her scalp. He was laughing damn him, and that simple fact slammed the elf's panic straight on into pure unthinking rage. He'd set her up, used her, stabbed her and left her for dead in some Divines-forsaken pit, and he had the gall to LAUGH about it? Vision still swimming, she lashed out blindly, up and back, with her elbow.

"Let go of me, you evil, double-crossing, bastard son of a whore!"

To be honest, she hadn't expected the blow to land on anything but air. So it was with no small degree of surprise that she found her arm, either through luck or inborn skill or some combination of the two, drive straight into the Breton's solar plexus. His laughter cut off in a startled grunt, clearly as surprised as she had been. Not one to ignore opportunity when it came knocking, Nalvyna twisted out of his loosened grip: panting, furious, and ready to fight.

He might have gotten the drop on her, but by the Divines, she was going to make him _pay_.

Mercer, for his part, looked neither impressed nor intimidated by her resolve. He braced a hand against the back of the chair she had just vacated, patting his chest with his free hand as if looking for a set of dropped keys. Aside from a slight unkemptness to his thick, grey-blond hair, he looked none the worse for being on the run. He flashed her a brittle smile; one that showed just a few too many teeth for comfort. "Not bad, kid," he drawled, pushing his hair away from wintry grey eyes with the back of his hand. "Wasn't expecting that."

The insufferably smug expression on the older thief's angular, rough-set face put Nal's teeth on edge. Standing beside his scattered paperwork, drumming his fingers idly on the back of the chair as he flipped a blackjack lightly in his free hand, he looked every inch a man who not only _owned_ the world, but also didn't have a care in it. He might as well have been sitting at his desk back in the Cistern. Her chest burned in remembrance, and she unconsciously mirrored his posture as she pressed a hand to the place where he had stabbed her. Had his aim been a little more true, or the man behind it in a little less of a hurry, not even Karliah's concoctions would have saved her. As it stood, she'd lain there for what seemed like an eternity, bleeding into the stone and listening to his footsteps fade into the distance.

It was too much. Nalvyna launched herself at him with a wordless roar, reaching for the dagger pinned to her wrist. He wasn't much more than an arm's reach away; all she had to do was close the distance and-

-And suddenly, Frey wasn't there anymore. Her knife whistled through empty space, rebounding off the back of the chair hard enough to send vibrations up her arm; hard enough to make her teeth click together in response. She reversed the slash unthinkingly, pivoting on her heel. Gloved fingers clamped down on her knife hand with vicelike strength, crushing her fingers against the hilt, and the Dovahkiin suddenly went airborne as Mercer rolled with her, back to back in a perfect shoulder toss, moving faster than a man his age had any right to. Rather than striking the floor, however, she found herself pressed against the far wall, cheek crushed against the mortar with bruising force.

"Mind you," her opponent growled, twisting her arm up and back in a joint lock, "I also wasn't expecting you to be anywhere but rotting inside a Nordic ruin. You are just bound and _determined_ to be a thorn in my side."

"What can I say," Nal wheezed, coughing raggedly against the ache in her ribs. "It's what I do."

_Brilliant planning, Nal. Snark him to death. There's no **way** that plan'll backfire._

Trying to twist free, however, turned the uncomfortable pressure against her arm into an inferno of pain. It felt as though someone had poured molten lead into her joints, and she desisted in the attempt almost immediately. Resting her forehead against the wall, panting in short, breathless gaps, she tried to fight down the black, viscous fear percolating in the reptile part of her brain.

This was _not_ good. Nalvyna was, by choice and by training, an archer at heart. Give her a bow, some decent cover, and a few dozen yards, and she was virtually unstoppable. In close combat, however, she might as well be flailing at a dragon with a herring: now that she was getting an up-close-and-personal view of a stonemason's handiwork, she could hardly believe her own stupidity.

Mercer leaned into her, planting his knee against the small of her back and using how own weight to keep her pinioned to the stone. He rested his chin on the hollow where her neck joined with the curve of her shoulder, breath stirring wayward strands of her hair into her face as he spoke. "Struggle, and I'll break your arm." Soft though his voice was, the words were etched in frost and steel, bleak and unforgiving as winter in the Pale. His fingers dug into the flesh of her wrist, warningly, as he spoke. "Understand?"

Gritting her teeth, Nalvyna swallowed a furious retort, nodding her head as best she could from the awkward, uncomfortable position. Mercer responded with a puff of short, humorless laughter, tapping the index finger of his free hand against her temple in admonishment. "Know when you're beaten. Smart girl."

If Nal had any sense, she would have let the comment rest. She was at a severe disadvantage, and she knew it. Her only chance to survive this encounter might rest upon playing the helpless rube.

Apparently, no one had bothered informing her mouth, which opened before common sense could hammer it into submission. "You didn't beat me," she hissed at him. "You haven't beaten anyone. The_ whole Guild _knows I'm here_. _They know you scammed them out of everything they own. And if you kill me, they're going to come down on you like a_ ton of bricks_." As threats went, she supposed she could have done worse (as last words went, they were at least marginally better than "oops"). Mercer, apparently, didn't agree, because he gave her arm another cruel yank. Bright spots flared behind the Dovahkiin's closed eyelids, and she sagged against him with a deeply regretful whimper.

The pressure suddenly released, but only long enough for her captor to flip her completely around, hard enough to make her teeth rattle. Mercer's face was suddenly inches away from her own, close enough that their noses were nearly touching. His features were etched in lines of flinty, barely-contained rage, and seconds later, the tip of an elven dagger buried itself in the mortar not a hair's breadth from her right eye. Whatever angry retort Nalvyna had been forming died in her throat, not even daring to blink away the stone chips that spattered her face.

After what seemed like an eternity, his breathing eased, as did the white-knuckled grip on the hilt of his blade. Freed of its previous resting place, the flat of the blade ghosted butterfly-gentle down the curve of her jaw- her full lips- the angular bridge of her nose-, tapping a lethal warning beneath her wide, copper-eyed stare.

"You... are... _forgetting something_," he bit out. If the former head of the Thieves' Guild didn't have her attention before, he certainly did now. The words dropped into her ears like ground glass, warped into something poisonous and dark. "Do you hear anything?" her captor whispered, tilting his head as if listening to something in the distance. "_I_ don't. No footsteps on the stairs, no one breaking in the front door. Do you know why?"

His voice dropped an octave, and he leaned into her shoulder, lips brushing against her ear. "You think you got the drop on me?_ I knew you were coming_. I was following you from the moment you set foot in here. You just walked into the lion's den, with no backup and no escape plan." The knife lifted from her cheek. Under any other circumstances, that would have been a comfort; sadly, he'd only repositioned it so that the point hovered a millimetre away from her cornea.

"No one's coming to save you. _You're all mine_."

Somewhere, deep in the corner of her mind where all Nal's stupid ideas were born, a tiny voice pointed out that he oughtn't want her (on account of her being prickly, and prone to headbutting people whose faces made such convenient targets). The dagger currently threatening to blind her, though, made a compelling argument for silence. Catching her general train of thought, if not the specifics, Mercer glanced at it and smiled. It was a deeply unnerving expression.

"Not so talkative now, are you?"

The point of the blade jiggled first up, then down, in a perversely playful gesture. The breeze of its passage danced across her eye; made it smart and water. "Apologize," he said, "and I might take it away."

Her eyes flicked from the dagger up to his face and back, incredulous.

"Better hurry up." His smile broadened, all teeth. "I think my wrist's getting tired."

Nal bit her lip and glared at him, saying nothing in the hopes that her gaze would strike him dead. The grey-haired Breton's smile fractured, and he crushed his forearm a little further into her throat. "_Say it_."

"I'm..." The word emerged weak and quavery, a little-girl's voice she almost didn't recognize as her own. She told herself was because of his arm crushing her windpipe, and not because she was scared out of her mind. She didn't particularly believe herself, but tried again nevertheless. "I'm sorry, Mercer. I didn't mean it." The acquiescence, oddly enough, cut her far more deeply than anything the man himself had done, and she felt her eyes sting unpleasantly. No. _No_. **_Balls_ **to that, she was not going to lose it, especially not in front of this piece of _filth_.

His response was a deep, wordless sound of satisfaction. The dagger tip swatted against her cheek again, its owner presumably emboldened by his brief success. "If I lower this, are you going to behave yourself?" There was no mistaking the threatening undercurrent in the question.

She didn't doubt for a second that if she agreed, then attempted to go back on her word, he'd try to bury the Altmeri blade in her eye socket. And considering how fast he moved at close range, she had the unpleasant suspicion that he'd succeed. Defeat rose bitter as bile in her throat, but at the moment self-preservation was more important than pride.

Frey arched an eyebrow at her hesitation, beckoning at her with two fingers in mock encouragement.

"Yes," she spat, spending her last gasp of defiance on looking him dead in the eyes, rather than down at the knife itself. "Shadows take you, _yes_."

When he finally, finally lifted it away from her skin, she couldn't suppress the tremors of mingled relief, adrenaline, and shame that wracked her aching frame. She'd barely even realized that she had been holding her breath.

"Much better." One corner of the older thief's mouth quirked upward: not a smile this time, but a smirk of cruel self-satisfaction. Not for the first time, it occurred to her that the man was the type who enjoyed gloating over an upper hand, and wondered how on Tamriel, with an attitude like that, he had managed to conceal his true nature from the Guild as long as he had. He gripped her chin between thumb and forefinger, tilting her head so that she was forced to concentrate on him.

"If you so much as_ twitch a finger_ without my permission..." He let the sentence hang, willing enough to let his captive audience fill in the blanks.

Nalvyna was not large, as Dunmer went. Just shy of five and a quarter feet, and weighing perhaps a hundred and fifteen pounds (give or take a few), she had the build of a sprinter. She'd always relied on cunning and stealth, rather than brute force, during a fight, and the Breton had little trouble keeping her still through sheer virtue of superior girth. In a way, she was almost glad of it. It gave her time to think.

Mercer's hands slid down her sides, reaching into pockets and tugging at hidden straps; searching her, no doubt, for any sign of concealed weapons. One by one, with aching thoroughness, he went through the process of divesting her means of self-defense. _Clank_. There went the wicked little punch dagger she kept in her glove. The series of gentle '_plinks_' would be the sharpened needles in her jerkin lining. _Clickity-click_. Her set of lockpicks. _Zzzzzzzzzzzwip_. The garrotte wire in her left bracer.

His very thoroughness, unfortunately, was starting to prove distracting, and not in the way that Nal had anticipated.

His hands crawled across the curve of her ribs with a surprisingly light touch, the heat of his deft fingers leaching through boiled leather armor to warm her slate-colored skin. Although brusque and undeniably businesslike, his touch was surprisingly gentle. Whether that was an attempt to avoid overlooking any less-obvious hidden weapons, or because he thought she'd given up on fighting back (or perhaps some combination of the two), she wasn't certain, but it was a not-altogether-unwelcome change, considering the brutality she'd been subjected to over the past few minutes.

When the rough pad of his thumb slid across the inch-wide expanse of bare skin at her waist -a gap between the hem of her jerkin and the belt below it- she bit back a startled gasp. She'd allowed her mind to wander, taking inventory of the items he'd removed and how many she had left to fall back on, and the interruption jolted her like an electric shock.

The plain fact of the matter was that (aside from the odd handshake, and even then there were usually gloves involved,) Nalvyna hadn't felt the touch of someone's bare skin on her own since the day she entered Skyrim. And she might make bawdy jokes and innuendos with the best of them, but she definitely hadn't had the time, nor patience, to allow someone this close to her person in... well, a very long time. _Adrenaline_, she thought, almost hysterically. _Adrenaline and stress and totally **nothing to do** with the man himself, no, godsdamn it, no sirree_.

Mercer must have felt her flinch beneath his hand, because the appendage paused in its journey, thumb hooked into in the juncture of leather plates. Hesitantly, she dragged her eyes away from the sight, and up the offending arm to his face. The wry, unpleasant smirk was gone, temporarily replaced by something utterly unreadable. One dark, curved brow arched delicately up toward his hairline, and his grip tightened -fingers curling against the curve of hip and abdomen- as he pursed his lips in something approaching intrigue.

Nal returned his steady, colorless gaze with an ominous sense of foreboding. Something unidentifiable had shifted in the tension between them; a nearly imperceptible change that Nalvyna couldn't place. She recognized it from the few times they'd sparred together- and, more recently, the time he'd yanked her back out of the path of a poisoned-dart trap, in Snow Veil Sanctum. Frey was considering something, and Nal had the feeling that whatever it was, she wasn't going to appreciate it.

His thumb slid gently on a diagonal path from a point just beneath her floating rib to her pelvis and back, an unconscious seesawing motion she'd seen him use back in the Cistern, at his desk, when engrossed in reading some particularly lucrative piece of correspondence.

The idle caress raised gooseflesh along the length of the elf's spine, and the dark, speculative look in her ex-superior's eyes did absolutely nothing to alleviate her heightened sense of just how close in proximity the two of them really were, at that particular moment.

"You know," he remarked, voice pitched so low that it was less sound and more vibration (one she felt through physical contact, chest to chest), "I always wondered what Brynjolf saw in you."

It was not a gentle thing, his lips meeting hers. There was nothing of tenderness and less of affection in the kiss; only savage possessiveness as his teeth sank into her lower lip. She let out a yelp, as much in shock as in pain, and pressed her head back into the stone in an attempt to escape, the metallic tang of blood flooding her mouth.

It was a futile effort- he dragged her forward, one hand in her hair and the other knotted into the back of her armor, the rough curve of his mouth not so much seeking as demanding access to her own.

He tasted of sweat, of metal polish, and the bitter tang of Black-Briar mead.

_Oh, hells._

The dark elf moaned, her entire body arching in a serpentine writhe, although she couldn't be certain anymore whether or not it was an attempt to push him away. An increasingly insistent part of her (and oh, the rational part of her mind was well aware of how very, _very_ twisted that was) wasn't sure she _wanted_ to push him away.

The insistent probing of his tongue, the scrape of his teeth against hers, sent a bolt of molten, amber-thick heat straight to her core. The hand at the back of her scalp tilted her head to the side and he traced a line of sharp, nipping bites from jawline to the hollow of her throat.

He was careful not to break the skin: applying just enough pressure to send sharp jolts of pain racing along her nerves, only to soothe them a moment later with lips, tongue, and the warm caress of his breath. When his mouth reached the shell of her ear, by Dibella, she could _feel_ him grinning.

"Brynjolf never even touched you, did he?" he murmured over the creak of leather; the hitch of her increasingly shortened breaths. Fingertips traced shadowmarks across the skin of her abdomen, writing a message she couldn't even begin to decipher in letters of aching need. "What an idiot."

Swallowing an entirely unseemly whine, she grappled at his shoulders, attempting to marshal the ragged scraps of her sanity long enough to get her feet under her, to slide away from his pinioning grasp. Frey released her hair long enough to slap her attempts sharply down, gripping her hand so tightly that the delicate struts of her finger bones ground against one another. She shuddered at the conflicting signals of her body, a traitorous, jumbled melange of pleasure and pain making her arch into Frey's chest with a deep, throaty gasp.

Message imparted, he traced his hand from her wrist up to to the base of her throat, sliding straps free from buckles and working leather away from flesh as it went. A pickpocket's hands, one of the roguish arts she had never mastered; their flutter and tug all business, and dark promise, at once.

The broad stretch of digits snagged against the raised edges of the slash wound on her shoulder, all but forgotten, pressing inquisitively into raw and stinging flesh. Nalvyna gritted her teeth, the intrusion prompting her to try and yank her arm back in an involuntary response.

Mercer leaned away from her and peeled away the shoulder of her jerkin, pushing the armor plating firmly to one side and twisting her bicep to examine the wound. "Clumsy," he muttered, the rough edges of his voice as thick as tar. He glanced up at Nalvyna's face, eyes turned thunderhead-dark, and it occurred to her distantly that his razor-intense expression, chiseled out of the hard planes and unforgiving angles of his face, was not altogether different than the glower he'd leveled at her when giving out assignments back in the Cistern.

"You're bleeding," he told her, and bit into the slope of muscle bordering the sides of the cut. This wasn't one of the sweet-sharp play bites he'd inflicted on her neck, but a tightening vise, deliberately intended to provoke. It had the intended effect; the Dunmer's toes curled as she flexed ramrod-straight. Toes curling inside her boots, she loosed a full-voice yell that was half scream and half roar, slamming her fist into his shoulder without bothering to ponder the consequences.

She might as well have tried to punch the Throat of the World, for all he moved.

As she stood there, head thrown back, briefly impaled on a spike of pure unadulterated agony, he eased the leather from her adjacent shoulder, the elven dagger (when had he pulled that back out?) slicing neatly through the cloth of her breast bindings.

"You... utter... _bastard_," she snapped between ragged breaths.

"So I've been told," Mercer retorted dryly, the knife carving its was through the jerkin straps on a path down toward her navel. "Don't hear you complaining."

Nalvyna drew breath to say something cutting, in all likelihood involving a variation on _"I'll show **you **'complaining'_". Cognizant thought was drowning in a rising tide of hormonal urges, driven on by the minute twitch of abdominal muscles and prickle of hair induced by her opponent's skillful ministrations. Frey might have been a selfish, backstabbing son of a bitch, but damn his eyes, he seemed to know exactly what to do to make her shut up. The tip of his clever, caustic tongue traced the invisible line of her sternum, following the path his knife had taken a moment before.

Gripping the bracer adorning his left wrist with his teeth, he yanked the obstructing wedge of tanned hide and metal free, spitting it idly off to one side. He lifted her breast, bare palm cupping and kneading the tender flesh in the manner of a noble's coin purse, testing its weight.

He exhaled softly against the aureole, allowed himself a soft murmur of approval of the nipple's erect firmness before taking it into his mouth. He rolled the bud of first one breast, then the other, between his teeth, sucking and tugging at them as Nal -uncaring of the thin, wanton keens she was making-, allowed her body to mold itself to his. In this act, at least, he was gentle; gradually allowing his tongue to explore an increasing radius of her skin.

Beyond the rhythmic pulses of her breath and the malleable, desperate twitches of muscle, Nalvyna's common sense quietly hung up its hat, decided it might as well go stick its head in Alduin's mouth for all anybody was listening to it, and left. The rest of her, preoccupied with the myriad euphorias of the flesh, did not mourn its passing.

His index finger caught at the front of her breeches as he stepped back from the wall, all but forcing the dark elf to mirror him step for step. His other hand, pressed into the curve of her lower back to steady her, slipped below the lip of her belt to play along the curve of first her buttocks, then stretch of her leg, with firm, languorous strokes. At this point, she couldn't tell whether he was attempting to find leverage or searching for a possibly-overlooked weapon; didn't, for that matter, particularly care. As he moved his knee to wedge her hips apart, she could feel the heat of his erection pressing, as insistent as the rest of him, into the curve of her inner thigh.

Apparently satisfied by her obedience, he raked the fingers of the hand that had been previously holding her by the belt down her torso, then her abdomen, in a ruinously slow line. His fingernails were short, cracked and ragged in places, and where the edges caught against the edges of her smooth skin, they formed parallel lines of deliciously searing warmth. Rotating his wrist, he slid his hand into her breeches, curling it around the deep, copper-russet triangle hidden beneath.

Index and center finger bent inward, pushing her folds apart and sliding into her center with a delicacy borne from two decades of relentlessly-honed experience. Nalvyna moaned, deep and low, crashing against him with a surge of her hips, all but begging her enemy to continue. His thumb hovered just over her nub- achingly close, maddeningly close, but out of reach all the same.

"Tell me you want me," he purred into her ear, driving home his advantage with cruel deliberation as he circled the edges of her clitoris. Her head snapped around to stare at him, fury sparking in the depths of cherry-red eyes as outrage warred with a torrent of desire. The man just did not know when to let a matter rest, and if he wasn't at that moment being the paragon of mixed signals, she would have been tempted to take it out on his hide.

Clearly, judging by the unyielding length of him pressing into him, the dark, smouldering heat suffusing every slope of his body, he wasn't completely immune to his own actions. Far beyond the pall of pheromone-induced smoke clouding the conscious part of her brain, a tiny, devious lightbulb flickered, gradually glowing into life.

"Say..." he bared his teeth, swallowed a shuddering groan. "Say '_Please, take me, Mercer. You are the best_'. All..." He paused, eyelids shuttering as as she ground her hips into him. "...you have to do is ask." The corner of his mouth twitched spasmodically: not quite a leer, but as close as he could manage given the circumstances. "Maybe I'll even indulge you."

Nalvyna moved with him, hammering words out of a reedy whine out of sheer willpower. "P... _please_..." She trailed off, and he inclined his head toward her face, unnoticing of the slender grey fingers creeping up toward his collar. She took two deep, steadying breaths, and gazed into his eyes with glassy, determined composure, opening her lips over his as she tugged him forward the scant few inches she needed.

"**Fus**..."

Nalvyna had the immense pleasure of watching Mercer's posture slide from wet, unthinking lust into slack-jawed astonishment as she locked her hands into fists around his vest straps.

It was not without a vindictive sense of satisfaction that she roared the second syllable directly into his face, letting go of him at the last possible second.

"..._**RO**_!"

The Breton, caught for one brief, shining moment completely off guard, hurtled backward as if dropkicked by a giant, slamming into the desk behind him with a thunderous crash of splintering wood and flying parchment. It split in half beneath the combination of his weight and the force of her Thu'um, and he crumpled to the floor in an ungainly tangle of limbs.

His elven counterpart crossed the room in two swift, long-legged strides, straddling his waist and slamming him down into the disarray she had created, a hand on each shoulder, before he could rise. Her copper-wire hair tickled against his throat as she bowed toward him, exactly as he had leaned in to her when she had been pressed into the wall. Panting, flush with what might prove to be even a temporary victory, she hooked her fingernails into the sword buckle at his chest and fixed him with a glowing, predatory smile.

"You take too godsdamned long." _My turn._

* * *

><p>Mercer blinked up at her. She watched the shift and clench of his jaw muscles as as he sorted through anger, surprise, and varying levels of chagrin, before finally settling on something like grudging respect. She rocked back on her glutes, shifting towards the base of him, and his fingers twitched spasmodically before wiping the back of his hand across his nose; checking it for blood.<p>

"You are just _full_ of surprises," Frey commented. Although his tone was almost conversational, the look he leveled at Nalvyna was positively molten.

She knew she'd regret her actions once the ringing in his ears died down, but it had been too tempting an opportunity to pass up. He let his head drop back to the cushion of scattered paperwork, wincing, as she divested him of his sword belt and hurled it into the far corner of the room. He wouldn't be needing that.

For a human who was well on his way to the middling part of his lifespan, Frey was in remarkably good shape. His chest was sculpted from the wiry slabs of muscle gained from a lifetime of effort. Not the body tone of manual labor, but rather from climbing, from the graceful arch of acrobatics and the sweet, straining pressure that accompanied a drawn bowstring. Given enough time, Nalvyna could read the tapestry of his life across that swath of exposed skin, as a fortune-teller read palms. She felt his heartbeat beneath her hand, straining to break free of its bone cage as the brush and scrape of her fingernails marked the contours of his ribs.

And there: her hands found it first, then her lips, lily-soft: the ruinous, ragged scar twisting the flesh just below the bridge of his sternum. The ancient ghost of Karliah's arrow; that tale, at least, had been nothing but the truth. It didn't escape her notice that a newer, rawer version of that injury throbbed, mostly healed but still sympathetic, over her own heart. He'd marked her to match him.

Mercer was too lanky and too full of rough edges to ever be considered handsome, but there was something about him -some deep, infuriatingly vague energy- that drew her intrigue all the same. That strange aura, the sense of being in violent motion, even when he was perfectly still, had given her something to live up to when he had sat at the head of the Guild. And although she could see the hilt of the elven dagger within arm's reach, half-hidden behind a splintered table leg, that selfsame feeling stayed her hand- though the aching, glass-sliver hunger, coiling like a dragon in the pit of her stomach, certainly helped.

The world was pain, and it was pleasure. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was both at once.

She had his trousers off with two quick, successive jerks of her hands, her own in even less, demands of the body overriding her more curious nature. She eased herself back and then forward, teasing him with his shaft cradled between her legs before easing herself onto him. Mercer's hips bucked, a tremor running through him like a pane of glass in a high wind. He surged up from the floor, shoulder to waist, sweat-slick hands trying vainly for purchase against her back as he surged into her.

"I wish," he panted, words wrung with passion into a guttural, near-indecipherable pitch, "I'd met you ten years ago. Would have taken you on every surface in the-"

Whatever he'd planned on finishing the sentence with dissolved into a wordless, spiralling howl of pleasure, the sound coupled with the spasmodic, bruising contraction of his fingers enough to turn Nalvyna's sinews to jelly. It intertwined with the elf's own scream -ferocity and abandon molding his name into the shadow of a Thu'um- as, together, they came undone against the stone.

The silence of its passage was deafening.

She wasn't certain how the two of them lay there, her throat torn to ribbons and her cheek pressed against the scar on Mercer's chest, listening to the decreasing tempo of his pulse and the patter of water on stone as his hand wicked the moisture from her sodden hair. When he tapped her shoulder blade, she glanced up at him. The eyebrows crushed downward, the bow of her mouth pulling into an annoyed pout at the insufferably smug look in his eyes.

"Tell you a secret," he rumbled in a conspiratorial undertone, "been meaning to do that since the day you walked into the Cistern." He tapped her shoulder again, more firmly, a hint of iron sparking in his voice. "_Mine_."

He propped her chin up on the inner curve of thumb and forefinger, tongue dipping briefly inside her mouth as he pressed a kiss into the dark elf that made her mouth tingle.

When the tingle began spreading down her neck and into her extremities, Nal was not amused. Her ire only increased when she tried to rub the feeling (which was not unlike pins and needles) away, only to discover that she was somehow unable to move her arms and legs.

SON OF A BITCH-!

As Nalvyna's vision fuzzed into a thick, oppressive greyish haze, her last conscious thought was that Mercer was shaking with laughter, and as soon as she had control over her hands again, she was going to kill him.

* * *

><p>Nal awoke some time later (perhaps an hour; perhaps only minutes), with a pounding headache and a towering resolution to never, ever, ever let someone born under the sign of the Serpent (he would be, too, damn him) touch her again. Glowering at the flagstones as if they'd personally insulted her, she set about gathering the shredded remains of her Guild armor. Tonilia was going to kill her- and how precisely was she supposed to explain the damage, anyway?<p>

_That opportunistic, manipulative scoundrel-_

Nal paused, frowning. When she lifted up what was left of her jerkin, a neatly folded square of canvas had fallen out of it, bouncing off her knee as it went. Opening it up, she was presented with what appeared to be a map of Skyrim, one section marked with a circle of red ink. She squinted down at it, perplexed. She supposed he'd left it behind because he wanted her to see it, but what in Oblivion was it supposed to mean?

Flipping the painted expanse over, she discovered a message written on the back, the words penned in a neat, utilitarian script.

_N-_

_Irkngthand. Three days. If you're late, I'm going to be insulted._

_Give my regards to Karliah._

_P.S.- If you found our last meeting to be unsatisfactory, I'll break into _your_ house next time._

_Eyes front,_

_-Mercer._

* * *

><p><em>**-<em>Admittedly, she was fairly certain that a 'hero of legend' wasn't supposed to run _away _from the dragon, while screaming "OH SHIT OH SHIT IT'S GOING TO EAT ME", on a regular basis.  
>Nobody was perfect.<em><br>_


End file.
